Gmail Suffers Service Outage

Gmail is undergoing significant service disruptions this morning, according to reports on Twitter and the crowd-sourced website DownRightNow.

The service was first reported down at about 8:30 a.m. Pacific.

“Gmail is down. As painful as it sounds, we might need to talk in person now,” tweeted Twitter staffer Othman Laraki.

Strangely, Google isn’t self-reporting any trouble. Update: Google has updated its dashboard to reflect the problems. It will continue to update the dashboard, a spokeswoman said.

“It’s funny b/c GMail says it’s ‘Still working…’ but no one else is right now,” tweeted Michael Roston, the New York Times social media editor.

Google’s Chrome browser is also crashing repeatedly for some users.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the Gmail mobile app continues to work.

Update: The problem is evidently resolved, although Google has declined to provide information on the cause. “Our current best estimate is that a significant subset of users’ Gmail web queries were affected for an aggregate of 18 minutes, from ~08:54 – ~09:00 and then from ~09:04 – ~09:16 Pacific Time,” the company’s dashboard says.